'Predators' Review: An Enthralling Documentary That Takes Aim at "To Catch a Predator"
- Dan Bremner
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner - December 19, 2025
I’ve always had a morbid fascination with online paedophile hunter groups, even while being deeply conflicted about them. On paper, the idea is simple and hard to argue against: expose predators before they have the chance to harm a real child and publicly shame them out of existence. In practice, it’s far messier. I’ve seen several UK-based stings collapse into chaos, livestreamed humiliation, botched police handovers, and uncomfortable moments where clearly mentally handicapped individuals are pushed into situations that feel far closer to entrapment than justice. The intent may be righteous, but the execution often undermines due process and, ironically, lets genuinely dangerous people slip through the cracks.
Predators (Not the Robert Rodriguez produced entry in the Predator franchise), takes that unease and traces it right back to its cultural ground zero: NBC’s To Catch a Predator, one of the most infamous and influential pieces of early-2000s television ever made. For anyone who lived through that era, this was appointment viewing, part moral crusade, part grotesque spectacle, part unfiltered reality TV nightmare. Watching it now through the lens of David Osit’s documentary is deeply unsettling, not because it exposes anything new about predators themselves, but because it forces you to confront how enthusiastically we consumed this as entertainment.
What makes Predators so compelling is its refusal to simplify anything. This isn’t a smug takedown or a celebratory victory lap. Osit dismantles the show with surgical precision, examining the motivations behind it, the incentives driving NBC, law enforcement, and journalists, and the long trail of ethical wreckage left behind. The documentary makes you sit with deeply uncomfortable questions: When does justice become a spectacle? At what point does public shaming become exploitation? And how complicit are we, as viewers, in demanding this kind of content in the first place? It's something I've thankfully grown out of after that COVID true-crime boom of ghoulish, sensationalist content was rampant. I am still guilty of every now and then tuning into a live Facebook stream of these takedowns and I even contacted several of the UK-based teams about doing a documentary on them (They all either ignored or declined. Saying showing their process would “Put children at risk).
The use of unaired and raw footage from To Catch a Predator is particularly striking. Without the sensationalist editing and triumphant framing of the original show, the stings become colder, uglier, and more morally ambiguous. The awkward silences, the confusion, the desperation, the moments where things clearly spiral beyond anyone’s control, it all paints a far more complex and disturbing picture than the cathartic “gotcha” moments the show sold itself on. These scenes don’t exonerate anyone, but they absolutely challenge the narrative that this was ever a clean or righteous process.
One of the documentary’s smartest choices is its self-reflexive approach. Osit never pretends he’s above the material. He actively interrogates his own role in presenting it, questioning whether Predators itself risks becoming just another layer of voyeurism. This level of self-awareness is rare in modern true crime, a genre now completely bloated with algorithm-driven slop, endless serial killer worship, and morally vacant shock content (largely courtesy of Netflix). Watching a documentary this thoughtful is a sharp reminder of what the genre can be when it actually has something to say, and isn't just utter garbage churned out on a weekly basis in 10-hour rundowns of a monster's numerous crimes.
The film is also chilling in a way that has nothing to do with jump scares or dramatic re-enactments. The horror comes from systems: from how easily networks justify exploitation in the name of ratings, how moral certainty erodes critical thinking, and how quickly audiences become numb to real human suffering when it’s packaged as entertainment. It’s gripping, but not in a bingeable, dopamine-hit way. It lingers and leaves you feeling unsettled long after it ends.
Most impressively, Predators manages to critique the spectacle without ever losing sight of the real stakes. This isn’t a documentary that accidentally sympathises with abusers or muddies accountability. Instead, it exposes how a supposedly righteous system can still be deeply flawed, ineffective, and even harmful, without meaning to be. It’s an adult, rigorous, and deeply uncomfortable examination of justice, media ethics, and our collective appetite for moral absolutism.
One of the documentary’s most revealing and destabilising moments comes with Chris Hansen’s own personal revelations about childhood trauma, which casts his crusade against predators in a far more complicated light. What initially reads as righteous moral conviction is reframed as something far more personal, even obsessive, a need to confront, control, and publicly destroy the very archetype of evil that haunted his own formative years. The documentary doesn’t weaponise this disclosure against Hansen, nor does it absolve him, instead, it deepens the tragedy of the entire enterprise. His methods, his certainty, and his unwavering belief in the show’s moral necessity suddenly feel driven as much by unresolved pain as by justice. It’s an uncomfortable but crucial insight, one that reinforces the documentary’s central argument: that when trauma, media power, and moral absolutism collide, the results are rarely clean, ethical, or sustainable, but it's understandable as to why he has continued this crusade through several shows following To Catch a Predator’s demise.
In an era where “true crime” and documentaries as a whole have been hollowed out into content sludge, Predators stands out as one of the most intelligent, ethically challenging documentaries I’ve seen in years. It doesn’t offer easy answers, and it absolutely refuses to let the viewer feel morally superior. It forces you to reckon with what you watched, why you watched it, and what it cost. A genuinely gripping, disturbing, and essential documentary.
'Predators' is streaming now on Paramount+
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